This invention relates to explosive devices and more particularly to steam or vapor explosive devices.
Conventional chemical explosives are frequently sensitive to heat and impact. Moreover, they generally yield toxic fumes when they burn as in a fire. Thus, these conventional explosives require special handling and storage precautions.
A phenomena of considerable industrial importance in recent years and one that may have significant military application is so called vapor explosion, often referred to as thermal explosion or steam explosion. This phenomena results from the extremely rapid heat transfer from hot liquid (e.g., molten metal) when introduced into cold liquid (e.g., water). Sporadic explosions resulting from this phenomena have been responsible for loss of life and property in industry for a number of years and efforts have been made to understand the extreme violence of these interactions. It is not presently known if these explosions are a result of liquid entrapment, flash of superheated liquid, collapse of vapor cavities, metal-water chemical reaction, hydrogen-oxygen reactions, or a combination of these things. However, resultant effects of these interactions are drastic, and substantial amounts of energy are released during such explosions. It would be desirable to provide moderate sized, high energy explosive devices based on vapor explosions. Such devices would have to be compact, self-contained, and have a relatively short initiation to explosion time.